Dina Shields and Melissa Shilliday became nitpickers to help destigmatize lice and their hosts

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Nitpixies is a hair salon that doesn't cut, color or style. School teacher Dina Shields, 47, and her Rockridge neighbor Melissa Shilliday, 48, offer the customer service of picking nits at their salon in the Oakland hills.

"I have a son, 10, and daughter, 8, and their school was pretty heavily infested with lice. I'd heard it was going around, and the first thing I thought of was, 'It couldn't be my kids.' My mother had grown up in Italy during the war and was really familiar with it. She noticed my daughter scratching her head and said 'I think she may have lice.' My mother checked because I didn't know what to look for. She found nits. Nits are the egg stage of the louse.

I went to Longs and bought a popular lice removal treatment. The directions say '15 minutes.' I put it on and it didn't do anything, so I called my pediatrician. She said, 'Disregard the directions. Keep it on your child's head for six hours.' There are more incidents of lice than there used to be because the lice have become resistant to the products that you find over the counter. That's the reason we have the problem today.

Lice are a parasite. They feed on the blood and live for about 30 days. They're microscopic when they start off and as they engorge themselves with blood they become visible to the naked eye. The eggs are easier to see. They move around very quickly so they're hard to catch. People think they jump or they fly. That's one of the myths about them. But they are wingless insects. Another myth is that they only affect poor people who don't practice clean habits. The truth is it affects all socioeconomic groups, and, in fact, lice like clean hair best. They crawl very quickly and spread by head-to-head contact or contact with hair accessories. If they fall off the head they can't survive more than 24 hours.

NitPixies is a salon where we manually pick out the nits and lice. We opened on Jan. 7, and our books were full that first day. We had five messages from people wanting service before we even opened. Symptoms are a very itchy scalp. If you come in the shop and you're not sure if you have lice, we can do a head check, and that's $50. The technician goes through strand by strand looking for eggs or live lice. If it's determined that they do have lice, then that $50 gets rolled into the first hour of treatment. We charge $100 an hour and it usually takes about an hour.

At the end of the manual picking we put on an organic solution, lavender oil and tea tree oil. It sits on the hair for about 20 minutes, and then we rinse it out. The lice don't like the smell. Some people subscribe to the mayonnaise, olive oil and petroleum jelly method for treatment, which means they slather the hair with these products in hopes of suffocating lice. It can work, but it's not an efficient or effective method for eradicating lice.

We see an average of five to 10 clients a day. It's year-round, from what I've heard. Wintertime seems to be pretty prevalent because kids are sharing hats and scarves and that's how they infest each other. In summertime they go to camp and get it that way.

The average age group is preschool through sixth grade, but 90 percent of the mothers who come in have it as well, and 10 percent of the dads. I think when my daughter had it, I had it too."

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The Lightbulb: Last year I was teaching full time, with two kids in elementary school. They both got infected with lice. I didn't know where to go or who to talk to. There were all these misconceptions and myths. That gave me an inkling - 'wouldn't it be great to have a shop where a parent can come in and really learn something and maybe even destigmatize the whole lice thing, because it's so embarrassing?'